Wednesday, January 7, 2009

To Bring You up To Date

I looked out the window wondering why I had made a decision to write about people that had flown too close to my soul. When one does this you embrace an honesty that almost makes you feel ashamed.

Doomed beautiful people.

A want to be writer is sometimes like a small child at an occasion and he doesn't fully understand if it is a wedding or a funeral, and in the end, I suppose it doesn't matter because the child will soon learn to see and hear and think like everyone else and maybe someday he will write it all down and make it disappear. There is another school of thought. and probably the prevailing one, which contends that literature and art do not make things disappear but instead makes things last forever. Both schools of thought can be right and wrong and sometimes both at the same time. My school of thought is by writing about my friends as I sometimes do, that I am paying tribute to them.

I suppose that by looking out the window I might catch a glimpse of my friend Bill, or Miss Amarillo 1969 or maybe either one of my parents and so many others whose love never had no sell by date. I sat back down at my computer to write something today. I filled my coffee cup. It smelled of sadness, perfume, and ice cream memories, and I knew that in time, like everything else in the nonfiction world, it too, would soon disappear.

II.Nothing ever changes, I suppose, in Amarillo or anywhere else in this unpleasant, never ending, nonfiction world. Fundamental change is virtually impossible for our species. Like little chirpies, we build our nest and construct our buildings, which time and terrorists and termites try to tear down. Like leaf cutter ants, we construct our highways that connect many different places in such a way that eventually they all become so similar there is no point in going anywhere to begin with. Like beavers, we build our bridges so when things aren't going very well people can jump off them and kill them selves, which is probably what I shouldl have done the first time I met Freckles.

I wanted to paint, I wanted to live, I wanted to write the world's best journal. And, to be sure,eventually in my mind I did. But, writing this journal did not bring fundamental change to my life. Far from it. What it has brought I should say, is a series of rather meaningless stories thought at the time were important.

They weren't of course. They never are.

I don't, by the way, believe the compilation of this journal has anything to do with much more than being a chronical of one mans deeds and thoughts. Writing a journal is a lot like writing a novel. It doesn't harm children or green plants or chirpies. It's like putting someone you love between two covers and forgetting to kiss them goodnight. Then you leave them there forever as you move on.

But it can't be too lonely when you are sandwiched between two covers.

People usually look in from time to time.

III.Late Christmas Eve, Freckles was holding both my hands searching my eyes for something I don't think she ever found. She had called earlier, "Is this the number I call for a real good time?" She had shown up and handed me a card, inside scribbled in a child like hand was a broken heart.

My own heart was not faring to well either.. The night, was in a state of creative interruptus. Some of us seem only to excel at lying in the gutter and looking at the stars. I knew what was coming, it has been coming for a long time.

"I think we are breaking up."

"You will write about this, won't you."

"Maybe."

"I'm begging you, don't suck all the magic and the humanity out of us."

Neither of us said anything for a few moments. Neither of us, I suppose had anything much left to say.

Finally Freckles broke the silence. "I'll just grab some of my things I 've left here and go home."Later she called again.

"So long, Wes ." She said.

"So long, Freckles," I said as both of us hung up simultaneously.

We had both done many things together, I thought as I stared up at the ceiling. Saying goodbye together wass not something I had envisioned us doing together on Christmas Eve. Suddenly, the ceiling looked very lonely and the room seemed very empty.

I thought maybe just maybe, I was now unhappy enough to become a great writer.